5/29/2023 0 Comments Booku pink kosherStarting in 1927, first-generation immigrants Ann Wilson Wangh (then Anna Wolfson) and her cousin Shirley trekked to Manhattan several times a week from East Orange, New Jersey, accompanied by their mothers, who paid for the lessons one at a time and arrayed themselves on either side of the open door to watch. As the New York Evening World reported on October 27, “Every girl who appeared at the Hip yesterday was so absolutely certain she could shake a wicked toe that Pavlova and her associates found the work of making selections very difficult.” The growing popularity of ballet in America, encouraged by the glamour of European dancers like Cavallazzi and Pavlova, reduced the stigma of a life on stage just as dance started to become more accessible to the immigrant girls who might take dance class at a settlement house or attend vaudeville dance performances with their family and friends.Ī small cadre of Jewish girls from immigrant families, though generally not the very poorest, began taking ballet classes with Michel Fokine, one of the most influential figures of early twentieth-century ballet. When, as a 1916 publicity stunt for a New York performance, Anna Pavlova auditioned students for a free ballet class, girls of every conceivable background, including Jewish girls from immigrant families, showed up as equal supplicants. There was no ethnic discrimination in the ballet studio (though it is worth noting that there was an unquestioning racist prejudice against ballet dancers of color that still reverberates today). A Morning Oregonian reporter who observed a class in February 1913 noted that Malvina Cavallazzi, the Italian ballerina who directed the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, told student Maggie Reilley (presumably Irish) to look at Esther Rosenberg (presumably Jewish) for the correct form. To ballet teachers, directors, and choreographers, talent mattered more than economic, ethnic, or religious background. Readers of the All-of-a-Kind Family children’s books about an early twentieth-century Jewish immigrant family in New York may remember that Ella, the eldest daughter in the family, took a job as a chorus girl for a while, in part because she could earn so much money as a dancer. Cather pointed out in her article that Metropolitan Opera Ballet salaries-fifteen dollars a week to start, eventually rising to twenty dollars-were competitive with the salaries of factory workers and even shop girls, and she wondered why more girls did not choose this path. The goal of the school was to create an all-American corps de ballet for the Metropolitan Opera so that European dancers would not constantly have to be imported for lack of proficient Americans. In 1913, author Willa Cather profiled the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School for McClure’s Magazine. But for some young Jewish girls, the ballet studio offered an alternative to the sweatshop or the department store, setting off more than a century of Jewish communal interest in dance. Ballet is not the first thing that comes to mind. When we think of the lives of Jewish immigrant families in early 1900s New York, we often envision tenements, factories, and lives of hard work.
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